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Why Governments Target Civil Society and What Can Be Done in Response a New Agenda

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Why Governments Target Civil Society and What Can Be Done in Response a New Agenda APRIL 2015 Why Governments Target Civil Society and What Can Be Done in Response A New Agenda AUTHOR Sarah E. Mendelson A Report of the CSIS Human Rights Initiative 1616 Rhode Island Avenue NW Washington, DC 20036 202-887-0200 | www.csis.org Cover photo: Shutterstock.com. Blank Why Governments Target Civil Society and What Can Be Done in Response A New Agenda Author Sarah E. Mendelson A Report of the CSIS Human Rights Initiative April 2015 About CSIS For over 50 years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has worked to develop solutions to the world’s greatest policy challenges. Today, CSIS scholars are providing strategic insights and bipartisan policy solutions to help decisionmakers chart a course toward a better world. CSIS is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Center’s 220 full- time staff and large network of affiliated scholars conduct research and analysis and develop policy initiatives that look into the future and anticipate change. Founded at the height of the Cold War by David M. Abshire and Admiral Arleigh Burke, CSIS was dedicated to finding ways to sustain American prominence and prosperity as a force for good in the world. Since 1962, CSIS has become one of the world’s preeminent international institutions focused on defense and security; regional stability; and transnational challenges ranging from energy and climate to global health and economic integration. Former U.S. senator Sam Nunn has chaired the CSIS Board of Trustees since 1999. Former deputy secretary of defense John J. Hamre became the Center’s president and chief executive officer in 2000. CSIS does not take specific policy positions; accordingly, all views expressed herein should be understood to be solely those of the author(s). Acknowledgments This report is made possible by the generous support of the Oak Foundation. © 2015 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved. Center for Strategic & International Studies 1616 Rhode Island Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 202-887-0200 | www.csis.org Why Governments Target Civil Society and What Can Be Done in Response A New Agenda Sarah E. Mendelson1 Chief among the current challenges facing the global human rights community (and broader civil society) is a contagion growing in intensity described best—if inelegantly—as the closing space around civil society.2 Since Russian President Vladimir Putin first came to power in the early 2000s, the space for civil society has been shrinking. Although the violence in Russia that accompanies the trend is an extreme form, the pressures on civil society are by no means just a Russian problem. According to Douglas Rutzen, the president and CEO of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), “since 2012, more than ninety laws constraining the freedoms of association or assembly have been proposed or enacted.”3 The closing space for civil society, in other words, is a global problem. Government harassment of independent organizations is as old as the state system itself, but this wave of targeting has a twenty-first-century twist. Specifically, as citizens find new ways to organize, assemble, and express themselves through the use of affordable technology, governments have found new ways to restrict public political space, suppress information, and label anything that they do not like as “foreign.” From Russia to Venezuela, from Ethiopia to Egypt, dozens of governments are pushing back in systematic ways against the enhanced power that citizens have amassed since game-changing, 1 Sarah E. Mendelson is a senior adviser and director of the Human Rights Initiative at CSIS. Follow her on Twitter @SarahMendelson. 2 This essay is adapted from Sarah E. Mendelson, “Dark Days for Civil Society: What’s Going Wrong—And How Data Can Help,” Foreign Affairs, March 11, 2015, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143235/sarah-e- mendelson/dark-days-for-civil-society. The essay was prepared for the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies’ Foreign Policy Distinguished Speaker Series at Cornell University (February 23, 2015); for a conference at Arizona State University titled “How do we know what we know? Charting the future for human rights documentation and analysis” (January 22–24, 2015); and for a conference that explored, among other issues, how to get better alignment of international relations scholars and practitioners on human rights, held at the College of William and Mary (January 14–16, 2015) titled “Strengthening the Links: TRIP [Teaching, Research & International Policy] Conference on the Theory-Policy Divide.” I thank participants in the meetings for thoughtful comments; Jack Snyder, Jim Ron, Warren Krafchik, Martin Tisné, Tom Carothers, Danny Sriskandarajah, Matt Evangelista, Sid Tarrow, and Monette Zard for comments on earlier drafts; Sarah Mohamed for research assistance; and the Oak Foundation for support. 3 Douglas Rutzen, “Aid Barriers and the Rise of Philanthropic Protectionism,” International Journal of Not-For- Profit-Law 17, no. 1 (March 2015): 5–44. See also CIVICUS, State of Civil Society 2013: Creating an Enabling Environment (Johannesburg: CIVICUS, 2013), http://socs.civicus.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ 2013StateofCivilSocietyReport_full.pdf; International Center for Not-for-Profit Law and World Movement for Democracy Secretariat at the National Endowment for Democracy, Defending Civil Society Report, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: World Movement for Democracy, June 2012), http://www.defendingcivilsociety.org/dl/ reports/DCS_Report_Second_Edition_English.pdf. | 1 affordable communication technologies have come to market. Beyond the basic challenges to running a nongovernmental organization (NGO), this phenomenon has several additional modalities affecting citizen bloggers, professional journalists, LGBT activists, and the physical security of human rights defenders.4 It is not an exaggeration to say that the countermovement is affecting almost everyone in the global community advancing social justice and human rights. Lateral learning between governments seeking to inhibit the work of human rights activists and civil society more generally is evident. In the last few years, numerous governments have mimicked or simply copied laws that shrink the administrative and legal space in which NGOs work. They make it difficult or impossible to get foreign funding, sometimes the only source of revenue for an organization. They make it administratively difficult to get registered or require that all events and plans be filed ahead of time with the government. They use smear campaigns, labeling organizations “foreign agents” and implying or claiming that organizations are working on behalf of a foreign source, thus calling into question the organization’s loyalty and credibility.5 This trend occurs even in countries where the government itself relies overwhelmingly on foreign assistance funding to operate.6 This issue has consumed human rights defenders in many parts of the world for over a decade, and practitioners inside and outside government increasingly view this phenomenon as an enormous threat to civil society. Despite high-level attention from, among others, the president of the United States and the United Nations, for the larger foreign policy community, closing space is an often overlooked or even unknown threat to peaceful and prosperous development. Yet it has multiple policy ramifications affecting global health, humanitarian assistance, climate change, and conflict prevention. Consider our own history: in the United States, civil society generated change fundamental to our political evolution, from the antislavery movement to women’s rights. Internationally, if Liberia or Guinea had adopted laws that made it difficult or impossible for NGOs to function or receive funding from foreign sources, how would these countries have coped with the Ebola virus? If Kenya adopts such laws, how will the country respond to another famine, and what will the next national election cycle there look like if the hundreds of organizations that helped create citizen demand for a nonviolent election in 2013 no longer exist? The closing of space around civil society merits attention well beyond those who are directly affected. 4 Borislav Petranov and Monette Zard, Keeping Defenders Safe: A Call to Donor Action (New York: International Human Rights Funders Group, n.d.), https://ihrfg.org/sites/default/files/Keeping_Defenders_Safe_Report.pdf. 5 Darin Christensen and Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Defunding Dissent: Restrictions on Aid to NGOs,” Journal of Democracy 24, no. 2 (April 2013): 77–91; Thomas Carothers and Saskia Brechenmacher, Closing Space: Democracy and Human Rights Support under Fire (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2014), http://carnegieendowment.org/files/closing_space.pdf. 6 Sisay Alemahu Yeshanew, “CSO Law in Ethiopia: Considering Its Constraints and Consequences,” Journal of Civil Society 8, no. 4 (December 2012): 373, 378–79. 2 | SARAH E. MENDELSON Why is space closing around civil society, and what can be done about it? CSIS will be exploring these issues in the coming years, helping to form an international consortium of experts and thinkers from think tanks and universities around the world, and especially the Global South. In this essay, drawing on a literature review and on discussions with activists from around the world, five factors that affect closing space—in some cases hastening it, in other cases, helping to keep it at bay—are
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